Posts Tagged: China

Monday 31st January 2011

I watched this TED talk the other day (which is always a great way of killing some time), and thought it was really quite fascinating:

I don’t think it’s a completely bad thing that things like this are happening. China was poor, it’s getting richer. This is good. If that happens, it’s also sort of predictable that China will grow big, considering the population.

The thing is, we need to be aware this is happening. I think there’s a sort of implicit complacency in the Western world. We assume we’ll be at the cutting edge, that we’ll always hold all the power; we’re the most advanced now, so we must always be the most advanced nations in the world. But that’s not true. In many ways, it sort of feels to me that we’re already starting to almost stagnate in many ways. Things like the green movement are really dangerous for this. Because that movement is all about trying to reverse development, to eschew technology to take us back to a supposedly “sustainable” way of living – these are the real conservatives. Except the only way to truly be sustainable is to embrace that technology.

Look at where most of the big engineering projects happen now: the middle and far east. They seem to have the same zeal for those projects as we had back in the Victorian era. It’s great. And where are we now? Protesting against High-Speed Rail, because it’ll go through a field a mile away from my house and it’ll spoil my enjoyment of the 6 o’clock news. We’re campaigning* against things like the Severn Barrage – successfully, as it turns out – because yes we need the electricity and of course it’d be great for flood control, but it might endanger the habitat of this group of birds which don’t actually live anywhere near the proposed site. And on the subject of protests; in Egypt, they’re protesting to overthrow the government, for free elections. This weekend in the UK, (mostly stupid) people were protesting to get companies like Vodafone to volunteer to pay more tax – and I do wonder how many of the protesters do likewise. It’s mad!

Anyway. I sort of got off-topic and started ranting. Do watch the video, it’s interesting.

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* From the site – “The expert charged with silt modelling and tidal impacts, has his post sponsored by Halcrow. How could his evidence ever be independent?” – that expert taught me fluid mechanics, and was my undergraduate personal tutor. I find it stupid that whoever wrote the site accuses him of bias.